Two Wills
by Derpnote
Summary: "In one universe I kill him; in another we buy a coffee table." Light considers his future options.


Two Wills

In one universe I kill him; in another we buy a coffee table. We keep the table in our house, the sprawling one in Kiyoto that we share when he's not in Portugal, or Los Angeles, or Laos. I keep an apartment in Tokyo too, one that belongs solely to me. I live there when he's away, which is a good 90% of the time anyways. The house is only for us when we're together, which doesn't happen very often. There are always murder cases for L to solve, all over the world. Not that I mind. I stay busy in Tokyo. I just go and go and go, and there isn't much time to be anything other than Light Yagami ─ son, brother, and chief detective of the NPA.

But the coffee table is the first thing we buy together to furnish our house. There's a bed of course, some essentials, but it's mostly things I order online and only check to make sure they've arrived. The coffee table we buy together. We find it in an antique shop in Venice, during one of the rare weekends I have off. L sends me plane tickets every few months when he knows I'm not on a particularly important case, so I fly out to wherever he is and we live out of hotel suits and off room service, and in the moments when we're not talking or fucking or touching, we are slow. I listen to his heart beat and his theories on current cases. I review his case notes and breathing patterns in tandem. We usually come to the same conclusions, but every now and then, I'll catch something he doesn't or lend an insight that will blow his pupils impossibly wider, and he'll look at me like I'm a god and like he loves me and like he is also a little bit scared of me. I live for these moments.

But yes, sometimes we are slow together. We read on couches and talk in bed, filling each other in on what has changed, filling in the empty spaces and gaps between weeks and months. Sometimes I'll talk about funny things my colleagues said or did (sometimes intentionally, sometimes through their incompetency), or I'll talk about the colleagues who fell in the line of duty and having to inform their families (deep breath in, make your face a mask, knock on the door). Sometimes I tell him about my father's ailing heart, or my mother's straining smile, or Sayu's dreadfully, wonderfully normal life (graduated high school, graduated college, got married, had a son who looks at me like I am the sun). Sometimes he'll tell me about visiting his successors or burying Watari, memories from his childhood or dreams from his past, and I feel like I understand him a little better. Sometimes we talk about the numbness and the way we both go about talking and smiling and relating to other people without ever really hearing a word or understanding them at all. Sometimes, I think he's the only person who's ever understood me. Sometimes, we talk about a future and a house we share together like it's a distant dream, nearly implausible, rather than a physical space we already own.

Sometimes we leave the hotel and walk for hours. We get too drunk off tequila in Porto and end up dancing in the street to a busser's lilting guitar. His swaying movements, awkward yet endearing, make me cling to him tighter, painfully I'm sure, so that he won't slip away. He's so thin. He's practically air.

Or we sit on a park bench in Singapore, under the shade of a tree. It's atrociously hot and L buys us shaved ices from a vendor. I feel like I'm melting, as cherry ice drips down my fingers in rivulets. He takes my hand and licks the sticky mess off my fingers unabashedly, his black mop of a head bobbing enthusiastically as he sucks. I swivel my head around to see who might notice, but no one does. Everyone's too wrapped up in their own worlds, so I let him continue. He looks serene, absolutely concentrated, as he suckles on my finger, and it reminds me of the deer in Nara, licking the salt off the bodies of sweaty tourists. When his large black eyes peer up at me, absolutely innocent despite his task, I feel even hotter than before, like the heat is coming from inside me instead of the beating sun.

More often than not, we just stay in the hotel room for days, fiercely trying to wear out the immediacy of touch and the need-you-miss-you-fuck-you-fuck-me-now feelings I always forget I'm even capable of until I'm standing in some doorway half way around the world and he's standing in front of me ─ all long limbs, dark eyes, and rumpled arrogance ─and I feel dizzy and nauseous, like I've been holding in my breath for weeks, for months, for every moment of my life that I wasn't with him. And then there is just him. His hands in my hair. His lips on my lips, chapped and rough and wet. His thigh pushing cruelly between my legs as I struggle to slam the door behind us. Eventually, this needy urgency burns into some slow satiated dance where we just indulge in each other for the sake of it─ nipping kisses, slow fingers, whispered things we'd never say otherwise. Words that I cling to for months, like a life raft in a storm.

Sometimes, almost always, we end up fighting, screaming, breaking things. Sometimes it's over his inability to stop being L, a role he's been playing since he was nine years old, and his inability to stay in one place for more than a year. Sometimes, it's over the fact that I still haven't told a single person about him, and that sometimes I keep girls in my apartment for the sake of…appearances, my family, hurting him? I hardly know why myself. They're just a string of women I'm not particularly interested in, but are tolerable enough to tote around to work functions and family holidays like pretty props. I imagine taking L to these things, and I see my family's confusion, my coworker's disgust, the rumors, and headlines, and possible forced resignation from Interpol and the NPA. He must know it too. That my life as Light Yagami is incompatible with my life with him.

Sometimes we fight just because he's an impossible bastard to be around: moody, volatile, eccentric, antagonistic. A number of our problems might very well be solved if he would just get some fucking sleep and maintain a normal blood sugar level. We almost always fight over the fact that I was once the world's biggest serial killer, even if he was never able to prove it, and Higuchi was officially arrested for Kira's crimes. Sometimes, I think it's his entire infatuation with me; I am the only case L was never able to solve. I know from the slowly filtering memories that come back to me over the years, that I must have been Kira. I don't remember it all, and what I do feels like a dream or a movie I watched years ago, just flashes of demons and apples and a pure feeling of divine power that I sometimes yearn for when I'm sitting at my desk late at night, staring at the headshots of murder victims. Their unblinking eyes accuse me. I could have saved them, prevented their deaths. Somewhere deep inside me I also know I am still that person. I am still Kira. I am still capable of almost anything, and so I put the headshots face down.

Sometimes (always), our fights are about what we are to each other: detective and murderer, equals and liars, lovers and enemies. We are always and above all else what we have always been. The respective titles and constructs we've built─ L, Light Yagami ─ are all we have. There are only lies underneath our masks. Sometimes, I leave him before I really have to. I always leave, obviously, but sometimes I end up catching a plane back to Tokyo in the middle of the night, with L's biting words still ringing in my ear and his grip still hot on my forearm, already forming a bruise, and I think that I'll never come back to him. I'll never see him again. Sometimes I don't care.

But I always do come back. I always do see him again, in Berlin, in Jordan. In Venice we find the coffee table. It's 18th century, bronze, handcrafted, and laid with gold. Its muted shine reminds me of the tennis trophy I won so many years ago, something I wanted just because I could have it. I stare at the table for a minute too long and L says he likes it too, so he buys it and places an order for it to be shipped to Japan. We spend the rest of the day in an unusually pleasant companionship, walking hand in hand along the Riviera and describing all the other things we might fill the house with: dozens of bookshelves, a fondue pot, a chess set, antique swords for L, cooking supplies for me. We talk about building a tennis court in the spacious backyard and a greenhouse, as L wants to take up gardening in his retirement. Maybe an observatory, Kobayashi prints (I've always loved the vicious spectacle of the Sino-Japanese war). It's all shit though, and we know it. If we ever actually move in together, our house will probably have the clinical aesthetic of a dentist's office, just all whirring computers, and a cluster fuck of case files. But as we walk along the water, we promise a future to each other, one where we are more than just times and statistics, murders and games, more than just our separate identities and accolades. I realize that I've never wanted to be telling the truth more than in this moment.

But it's a moment that belongs to a different universe. It's another future, another reality. One where I don't touch the note and regain my memory. One where, instead of warring with each other, we walk along a street in Venice. But no matter how well I can picture that reality, in this one I kill him. And I will. Tomorrow a god of death will write his name in her notebook. His heart will stop and he will die in my arms, and just like that, I will become a God and the world will change. It's not much of a sacrifice at all, inconsequential really. But in another universe we might have lived out our lives together in the best way we could. In another universe, we buy a coffee table.


End file.
